If you find bugs, let me know, but I won't guarantee it will be fixed...

Known bugs so far:
-somehow the JWM config file got messed up and the settings don't seem to stick the current workaround is to set the background through xsetroot in the .xinit
-hv3 doesn't work properly and gives funny error messages. Start up time is long anyways. I'll throw it out in the next version.

File manager:
Rox is not removed, but somewhat hidden. For the users who are used to puppy this is probably the biggest change from stock puppy. For your usual file juggling you can use emelfm. This file manager is magnitudes faster than rox, so it's worth giving it a try if you have a slow machine. I didn't remove rox completely because I didn't know if this would probably break something else.

Texteditor:
One of the best finds was gtkedit. Extra tiny, extra fast. Apart from printing, it has the same functionality as leafpad. Leafpad starts on my machine in about 5 seconds, gtkedit is up and running in about one second- whohooo.
If you really want to print out a textfile- use leafpad- it is still there. The binary of gtkedit was taken from the sourceforge site. The proggie is GPL and the source code is there, nothing was changed.

Image viewer:
The fastest picture viewer (with slideshow etc.) I could find was xnview. Unfortunately its not FLOSS, but free for non- commercial use. I'm looking desperately for a free alternative. Suggestions are very welcome.

Browser:
Second best find was firepup (thanks again tuuxxxx). Firefox 1.5 with security updates up to 3.something. I have no real numbers, but it feels a tad quicker than stock firefox 3.xx.
If you are RAM or CPU challenged, use dillo or elinks for web browsing.
Elinks is text based, but surprisingly easy to use, even for a cli- noob like me. Just click on the links with your mouse as usual.

The usual system tray applications (aka: battery status indicator, sound mixer)
My old Laptop uses APM, so I used rxvt -e cat /proc/apm to give an idea how much juice is left in my battery. Just click on the yellow battery symbol in the tray.

Sound volume is adjusted with alsamixer- just click on the speaker in the tray.

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Original post:

Since having used Puppy Linux for quite a while now on my old trusted PII- 300 MHz, 128 MB RAM subnotebook, I thought I could do faster.
My goals are to get rid of some of the memory hungry apps like rox, blinky, freememaplet and a bunch of others. I'll add a lot of TK apps- small and usefull, but unfortunately, ugly as hell also. The good thing is that you will get used to the ugliness after a while- LOL.
I will further add a lot of browsers, from firepup, Netsurf, hv3 (if I can get it to work) down to elinks. My machine runs firepup OKish (thanks ttuuxxx!!), but others may need lighter browsers so they will be on board. Furthermore I'll add bluefish (if someone knows a lighter WYSIWYG Html- editor please tell me) and, since the main reason for this machine is to entertain me while traveling, mplayer (using xv and hardframedropping, it plays fullscreen movies on this machine) and a lot of small games. The final distro size doesnt matter that much to me since it'll be a full hd install anyways and my harddrive is 20 GB.

Since my monitor can only do 800x600, I will use a custom extra small JWM theme to make the most out of the screen realestate.
Unfortunately I am so used to gnome from my main Computer which runs Ubuntu nicely, I definitely need my top AND bottom panels.

My base distro is 4.1.2 barebones retro.

So far pmount works together with emelfm nicely, the desktop theme works and I learned how to install dotpups and pets without rox.

I will publish the puplet when I have something real to show to the world.

Any input on how to speed up puppy further will be appreciated, just keep in mind that I'm not a coder, so please be patient.

Thanks for all who are involved in making this easy customizeable distro possible.

ChristianLast edited by zenfunk on Wed 17 Feb 2010, 08:57; edited 5 times in total

When I look at my current version I am using, I really feel there are way too many apps. Justhow many calculators end users need? Just how many editors do we need? Just how many Graphics apps do we need? Even the internet and network don't need that many apps in the menu.

I used to use Austrumi purposely older version-1.06. It has only absolutely necessary apps. AND there is no depository.

Simplicity, indeed.

I believe you should take a look at older versions of Austrumi.
It has all the apps for general use such as abiword, Gimp, Browser(Bad choice!), CDR,(Burns DVD too), remaster tools and 1 network tool.

Boots fast and runs real fast.

Puppy's menu makes me dizzy. We don't need all those.

I heard many exotic cars don't come with air conditioners just for the sake of speed.

Instead of adding too many apps, it does make sense to use one perfect working WINE to run Windows apps outside of Puppy 3fs and sfs.

When I look at my current version I am using, I really feel there are way too many apps. Justhow many calculators end users need? Just how many editors do we need? Just how many Graphics apps do we need? Even the internet and network don't need that many apps in the menu.

I used to use Austrumi purposely older version-1.06. It has only absolutely necessary apps. AND there is no depository.

Simplicity, indeed.

I believe you should take a look at older versions of Austrumi.
It has all the apps for general use such as abiword, Gimp, Browser(Bad choice!), CDR,(Burns DVD too), remaster tools and 1 network tool.

Boots fast and runs real fast.

Puppy's menu makes me dizzy. We don't need all those.

I heard many exotic cars don't come with air conditioners just for the sake of speed.

Instead of adding too many apps, it does make sense to use one perfect working WINE to run Windows apps outside of Puppy 3fs and sfs.

I look forward to seeing your leaner, faster PULP

John S

Hi John,
please don't hang your expectations too high. The faster speed of pulp is mostly gained by stripping out eye candy (no wallpaper, blinky, freemem etc.) and using older, tried and solid (?), but also quite ugly and unconfortable to use apps. This will also include some CLI apps. Since I'm no coder this might be all I can do. The wizards (pmount, network setup ...) will still need GTK 2- but since they are only run once in a while this shouldn' t affect day to day performance too much.
Since it uses quite old apps I don't think that it will be very user frendly. You should know at least a little bit about the command line to get along.

I used barebones puppy because it is quite fast to begin with and it can be remastered quite easy. Depending on what script I'll use, I probably will not be able to reduce the amount of apps that barebones shipped with. At least this is my understanding for now.

Running wine is probably not a good idea because it adds one layer of overhead- I like native, free software apps better. It will not be included, but can be installed afterwards.

Frankly I don't believe that having a distro size of 80 vs. 100 MB makes that much of a difference. So, although I agree with you 100% why one should need 2 or 3 calculators, I really don't think that stripping them down to one would affect the speed that much. It can't be more than a couple of kB in distro size.

I'm more focussed on the amount of apps that are actually run all the time- X (can't do much about it), Rox, Window manager (although JWM is a keeper) etc.

If even MS tries faster now it is due to their incredible bloat that accumulated over the years and culminated in Vista. The bloat in Vista is magnitudes higher than in any Linux I know of. Even Ubuntu is ultralight compared to Vista.

Right now its under development and exists on one computer (mine!) .
Take it easy, you may get it when it's ready. All I can say is that it won't be something revolutional. If you have a halfway decent computer (any Pentium III, 256 MB RAM) you wouldn't even consider running PULP, since the stock Puppy runs at a decent speed anyways, is easier to use and looks way better.
This thread exists to help me in pulling this thing off, since I guessed a lot of questions during the building process will come up. Also, I hope for some suggestions from the communitiy.

I also figured that pulp would be a cool name for a puplet, so I also started the thread this early in development just to be the first .

So, If anybody has any input on how to make pulp faster- please tell me.

So far I got emelfm to work nicely with allmost all files (eg. opening mplayer when you click on a movie etc.

Mplayer works.
Xmms works (I grew up with Winamp ya know...)
mp123 and ogg123 works
firepup works.
So far elinks has greyscale "colors", a bit more would be nice.
Pmount works together with emelfm, although I will probably throw this one out, because emelf has some nice mount options in the context menu allready.
JWM looks gnomish.
Found no nice lightweight chatclient- the centericq package is gone, naim has a weird bug and eats up 100% of the CPU while beeing idle. CLI or GTK 1.2 based would be great- any ideas?
Old version of hv3 works, the new one doesn't.
Gtkfind works.
XNview is a superfast picture viewer, but ugly as hell .
Epdfview included, didn't like xpdf.
More to come....

To be frank- it looks more and more like stock oldversion puppy- LOL- all the work for "nothing".

To be frank- it looks more and more like stock oldversion puppy- LOL- all the work for "nothing".

Hi Chris,
So I know exactly how you feel when you wrote this.

FWIW:
When I first got interested in Linux as a replacement for my MS desktop I initially downloaded one of the main big distros. I was seduced by the many free apps out there which I eagerly downloaded whether I really needed them or not, and ended up with a large and resource hungry monster.

It was okay for my capable desktop PC but for smaller older stuff like an old laptop I had I knew it was not the way to go.

So I found Puppy and it's many derivatives, and it has served me well. Currently I even use it for my day to day desktop stuff.

But, like you, wanting to reduce the bloat and get things speedy, I found Arch which let me build from the ground up and offers the user so much choice without it being inaccessably difficult to do for a relative newbie like me.

But......Arch taught me just how difficult it is to get it all right. Even if an application is smaller than another what are the dependencies and can they be used for another app. And how can the bloat be taken out. The choices to be made were not A versus B but a whole lot more complex.

So my initial efforts how to make a lean distro ended up not very lean at all. I soon learned that with so many of these distros including Puppy it's easy to see how an improvememt can be made here or there but seeing the overall picrture is much much harder to do. I admire those folk who have succeeded and Puppy is one such success story IMO.

But making your own can be great fun, and it's very instructive. So keep up your efforts and good luck to you.

But, like you, wanting to reduce the bloat and get things speedy, I found Arch which let me build from the ground up and offers the user so much choice without it being inaccessably difficult to do for a relative newbie like me.

But......Arch taught me just how difficult it is to get it all right. Even if an application is smaller than another what are the dependencies and can they be used for another app. And how can the bloat be taken out. The choices to be made were not A versus B but a whole lot more complex.

I also had a look at arch, but decided against it, mainly because I'm too much of a noob right now. Might be worth a second look in a couple of months when I have learned more.

Quote:

But making your own can be great fun, and it's very instructive. So keep up your efforts and good luck to you.

Absolutely, I learned more about Linux while doing this than in the last two years using ubuntu as my main OS.

Sure rolling your own distro is fun. I've been half ironic when I wrote the above sentence. Although it now looks like puppy 1.0, it still has the advantage of a newer architecture underneath, wlan will work much better...

Since you like my firepup I've reduced the size of it by around 2 mb compressed but I haven't packaged it yet, also the last seamonkey I compiled without mail but with wysiwyg is smaller than the default Firepup. I personally would go with Dpup, its way fast, and you can shrink it down by building it. I find it a lot more responsive then puppy. I'm actually in the middle of building a reduced version
anyway goodluck
and you might want to use saig office. its like 1 MB but can do some real good task.
actually my FireHydrant 75MB lite has it,
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31049
ttuuxxx_________________http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games

Tahnks a lot, I tried it out a couple of weeks ago and quite liked it. Never thought about including it- in hindsight- I son't kno why.

Dpup could be the base of a future release. First I'll finish this and will refine it a bit.
Basing the puppy concept on a major distro repository solves almost all of the things I don't like about puppy. Just add a propper multiuser and sudo and I'll marry BK. I really find sudo and a login essential on my computers. In Puppy it is so easy to break stuff.

So far none of these commandline music players worked. My current workaround is to use either xmms (which is way too heavy on the system, or to use ogg123 and mp123 with xhippo- lightweight but a bit unconfortable t use (no fast forward etc.) I heard good things about moc but it starts, complains about invalid arguments from the server and freezes.
cmus did't work either but I will give it another go.

Quote:

yafc for ftp http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31514

Thanks- I currently used tkftp, but that is just slightly lighter than gftk.

There I am complaining in several posts that puppy doesn't have a big repository or a "propper" package manager- and then I learn that the 3.xx series can have slapt-get and even gslapt all along.
I'm thinking a lot lately about changing my base to fat_free 3.01. Since slapt-get schould work better with the 3.xx series than the 4.xx series- is this an issue or can I run slapt-get on puppy 4.12 without much issue.
Are there any restrictions in using slapt in puppy?
Is the update of puppy system files possible via slapt?
Is the whole slackware 12 repository available?

Sounds all too good to be true- a full blown OS with puppies weight...

I'm confused.
The title of this thread got my interest, but now I suspect that PULP doesn't even exist yet, except as an idea.

Are you suggesting it is PULP Fiction?

I think 3.01 with its Slackware roots is a good plan
Austrumi which I rather like is also Slackware based
Would that hybrid be Pustrumi?
and Spup (built with the Woof Build system is in Alpha 3)
is another possibility

Nimblex another Slacker would probably be to big but it does have an excellent online builder
http://custom.nimblex.net/
Too big, too big.

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